Tag Archives: pbbg

Mecha Asylum Design Document

Posted by Jacob Santos on December 30, 2008 Comments Off

The current game is a little convoluted and broken, which means it is unplayable until I rewrite it. I’m going to focus on a minimal feature set for the next version to get the game playable and improve the quality of the features. By keeping a small feature set, I can know ahead what features I should complete and how long each feature will take. Also I’ll know when I’m finished with the project.

This time I’m not going to open the game until I’m completely finished and the game works after testing and acceptance test cases are completed. In order to improve the quality, a lot more testing is going to be done for this game and all of the games I make in the future. It will take longer, but focusing on improving the quality before players bring it up should improve the reputation of the games.

Story

The main setting and story line will change. The game will take place on an alien planet, the soldiers from different fractions crash landed and need to rebuild their fleet to get home. The other fractions aren’t going to make it easy for the others. The players will need to regroup, rebuild, and fight off the enemy to escape the planet and head back home.

Focus Points

The focus points will be territory, soldiers, research, and buildings. These will be tied together and balanced, so that the meek aren’t completely overrun by the strong. There will also be time limits and the success condition will happen over several months.

I want the game to last long enough to where new players that joined late can learn the game, group with people and appreciate the game long enough to where when the next game comes along they can just jump in and start as soon as possible. They might not win, but they’ll have the opportunity soon. I also don’t want the game to be over soon enough to where none of the players had enough time to accomplish the objectives and enjoy the game.

Territory

Research items used to escape the planet will appear at different locations. Only when the fraction has captured the research item can the item eventually be used to escape. This will mean that a grid based system will need to be used in order to coordinate where the research items and what land the fractions hold.

LandThe Grid structure of the game will limit the amount of land the players will be able to fight over and hopefully should limit the amount of players are in the game. I believe I’m going to have a main grid that covers the planet, sort of like latitude and longitude. Then sub grid coordinates with those and so on. The containers will be big enough to hold the player and a number of buildings.

This will mean that one piece of land is actually an square acre or larger depending on the amount of buildings I finally allow. Actually, I think I’m going to do it in sq. miles and sq. kilometers.

This should allow for quick access to where players are currently and I won’t actually have to populate the entire planet with coordinates. By calculating the distance, I can figure out how long it will take for one player to attack another. At the most, since the database table could grow to be very large, or at least the coordinate table with many rows. It won’t take that much space since the most the table will have is numeric values with one of those pointing to the player which holds that piece of territory.

There will also be mining to harvest precious materials in order to pay for mecha suits, buildings, and research. The amount of mines will only be preset for the initial land of each player. Captured land will be randomly generated and will remain until the game cycle is complete.

When the land is destroyed only the buildings on that land will be destroyed or captured.

Soldiers

The mecha suits from the previous game will be used in this game as well. The mecha suits will gain attributes that will be able to be extended, so that balancing can happen quickly. Since there are only going to be five mecha types, the base attributes might be hard coded with the modifiers held in the database.

The mecha suits will be built from buildings, and require men that will also grow depending on the amount of food, research, and housing. Housing is another type of building that can be constructed.

The different suits have different capabilities that allow for different maneuvering, strengths and weaknesses. Some of the land types will not be able to bring down the flying types, no land to air missiles. The strength and weakness ratio will be dealt with the Rock-Paper-Scissors usage. This will improve the balance and prevent one player from building one type to rule all. That said, there is still one type that is all powerful, but will be extremely expensive.

The attributes will be about four or five to start out, but I can envision that future versions having more. The difficulty is that the more attributes the harder it is to balance the game. I don’t think more than 10 will ever be used, but that will decide upon later and depending on the game play.

There will also be a mechanical device that will spy, thief, and capture land/buildings. This device, called a probe, will not have any attack capabilities, but will have other purpose during the game to help find the main research items.

Research

Research will be very important and I will build a tree much like the grid idea. The Research will have dependencies, amount of time to complete, and materials. I’ll create the tree after the component is completed and think of what will go into the tree after it is complete.

The feature seems to be easy to create, but it will be difficult and time consuming thinking of all of the research items.

Buildings

There will be different types of buildings for different purposes. The list below has them all:

  1. Housing

    Used for the amount of men will be available. Housing will be needed and when these are destroyed, then the available mecha suits can not be used beyond the amount of men available. Will also double as food suppliers, because there won’t be a food building type.

  2. Mecha Manufacturing

    Builds the mecha suits. I’m undecided, if one building will build one mecha suit, or if the building can be queued to build all suits for one type at at time. I’m going with the former, but the latter will allow for greater flexibility.

  3. Research

    These types of buildings will be required for research, there will be different research buildings. There will also be one main building for improving the research speed and level.

There will not be much macro-managing with the buildings, so besides the research buildings, there won’t be many buildings to develop items.

New Player Protection

The game will employ “New Player Protection” to keep stronger players from attacking new players. This will be based on the strength of the player and as long as the player doesn’t attack anyone else. This should allow for new players to grow and learn the game without being harassed by other stronger players.

When the player has graduated from this status, there will be ranges for attacking. This is only in the event that the game reaches enough players that each range has enough players within it. I’m going to try to develop the ranges to where it is dynamic and allows for recalculating the ranges based on growth and the amount of players.

Game Cycles

The game cycles will continue until all of the research items are collected and a single fraction has collected all of the pieces needed. The research items will not exist all at the start of the game. I want to allow the game to continue for at least two or three months before all of the needed items are available.

There will be more than one research item available of the most basic items, which will be available at the start of the game. Other ones will become increasingly rare as the game goes on. The first couple of cycles will probably require that the research items be “dropped” near the territories of the players, so that they can be found within the five or six month hard limit, where the game will automatically recycle whether or not anyone “won.”

Collecting all of the research items is the win condition and required of the players to track the components down. This will force players to try to collect as much territory as possible.

Possible Modules

Modules are game components, which can hopefully be used on other games. If developed correctly, these modules below can be used in future and past projects. They will be developed separated and updated on all of the games, since they aren’t tied to any single game code.

The games will be developed around modular components to reuse as much code as possible. Each game will have separate components that won’t or can’t be used elsewhere, but as much code as possible will be transferred to the Quantum Game Library as possible.

There will be the code that will exist in QGL and the plugin code for the game engine that will use the QGL code. The code that isn’t dependent on a database will be committed to QGL and the code that does rely on the database will not be part of the QGL.

  1. Territory Grid
  2. New Player Protection
  3. Research Tree

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Heat of the Race Design Document

Posted by Jacob Santos on August 28, 2008 Comments Off

Heat of the Race is a racing simulation, that is text based. The player customizes their cars and bikes and competes against other players. The setting will take place in the future, so that the car and bike components and racing locations will be futuristic.

The player will win money from races and will be able to buy better parts to go faster, and complete races better. There will be racing teams that will help each other and will be able to compete against other teams to win greater amounts of money.

Cars / Bikes

The cars and bikes will have attributes that each part will increase or decrease depending on the quality. The speed of the car won’t matter much, if the vehicle can’t turn at the top speeds. The amount of upgradable parts will be small with the first version, but the amount will increase as development continues.

There are two types of bikes and cars, one will be with wheels and one will be hover crafts. The player can have both types, and unless they have both they will be restricted on which race track they can go on.

Some attributes don’t really make sense, since the player will not be able to control the car and will get the results quickly. It is text based, so there isn’t much that can be done to allow the player to control the vehicle. Future versions might have something from old Nintendo and arcade games to improve the racing experience. The first version will just give the results immediately.

Race Tracks

There will be several race tracks with different qualities of turns, wetness, temperature, etc that will affect the cars. The race tracks will also be one different planets and in outer space. There will be attributes for the race tracks and will also have grid layouts. This will allow for calculating the car attributes based on each race track, like it would if they were playing an actual PC racing game.

Parts

The cars and bikes will have upgradable parts, which will allow for improving the vehicle against other players. The full list has not been decided and will be developed after the game code is completed. The parts will be entered dynamically, so that new parts can be added quickly and current parts can be modified easily.

Teams

There will be the team leader that will control how much the fee to join and stay in the group is. The fee is optional, depending on the team leader and the team leader can use it for gifting players parts and setting as a betting pool for racing against other teams.

I want to develop the team mode to have many enhanced features for controlling the team almost to the macro-management level. I want to allow the team leader to do many tasks for the group, but have most of them to be optional.

This will most likely be a module, so that it can be applied to other games easily and quickly.

Conclusion

This game will be developed next year, during the first or second half, depending on the number of projects that have been completed at that time. Battle Machines will be developed before this, and this game will also be developed after Earth 3045.

I think I might create a simple version, much like the Farmer Sim pbbg, and then continue to add features after the games are finished. I think the goal will be to release very simple game which have all of the features. This will allow the games to be playable, but not take more than a month or two to complete and build off of the other games that came before it. Therefore teams might not be part of the first version.

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Farmer Sim Design Document

Posted by Jacob Santos on August 24, 2008 2 comments

Farmer Sim PBBG

The concept of the persistent browser-based game is simple, you grow crops and raise animals to sell to the different markets. It is a basic simulation of farming, partially because I haven’t farmed a day in my life and I want to finish the project quickly.

There are a few features of play that need details.

  1. The first is land, which will limit how much you can grow and, or raise. This also includes the amount of help is available to tend the land.
  2. The seeds you can plant,
  3. the animals you can raise,
  4. and the amount the market pays for the animal and harvest crops.

Land

Every player will start out with set number of acres. The player can buy more land later in the game, when the player has the money for it. The player’s avatar can only maintain a limited amount of land, before the player will need to hire help. There will be several kinds of help ranging in how well the “help” works.

Cheap help will probably not do much for the player, but expensive help might not be what the player needs either. There will be a balance between the cheap help and the expensive help in the abilities. This is so that each kind should be used. The player should be able to get away with using all of one kind, won’t be as efficient, but will work.

The player will be able to buy land outside of where the player starts. The player will also be able to hire soil experts to test the land to see how well the land will grow crops. To make it simple, the land will either be suited for crops, animals, or both. The land each player starts with is suited for both.

The price for land will be set by how far or close it is to the cities. Having land close to cities has the advantage of being able to deliver supplies faster and receiving money sooner. To simplify the game, deliveries time will be set and can not be upgraded to shorten the time. This will allow for players to buy up land away from the cities for cheap and still grow or raise animals and not be limited for long to their set acres.

Land Attributes:

  • Growth Type: crops, livestock, or both
  • Distance From City
  • Closest City
  • Acres
  • Player

In future versions, I want to have a grid for the acres for the number of cities and create new cities when new players exceed the range of the city. This simple attribute set will allow for unlimited amount of players to be the equal distance from the city, while also allowing for unlimited amount of land to be bought at different ranges from the city.

Worker Attributes

  • Acre Limit: How many acres of land the worker can tend with the base efficiency.
  • Crop Efficiency: How well the worker can tend crops within the acre limit.
  • Livestock Efficiency: How well the worker can tend livestock within the acre limit.
  • Hours of Work: How long the worker will perform their duties before ending their “shift”.
  • Price: How much it costs to hire the worker.

Even the player’s avatar has the same attributes, so this will allow for easier balancing of the game. It will also allow for adding new workers in the future. I only plan for three other types other than the player’s avatar worker. I’m not sure if I’m going to tell the player all of the attributes, but they will be pretty simple to figure out in the first version.

The cities will have their own attributes, but those will be kept secret from the players. The land will also have a concept of taxes and overhead. This will prevent the player from gaining to much land and money too quickly. The player will need to make at least so much to prevent bankruptcy. Going over the overhead amount will give the player profit to enjoy spending on more land.

I’m wondering if the taxes and overhead can be built in to the market of buying seeds / animals and selling crops / processed foods. If the supply is too much then the player will make less than what was spent to buy the seeds. This can sort of work like gambling in that the player might lose money on the market or gain money on the markets.

Seeds

I’m going to limit the amount of seeds, but I’m going to develop the game to where I can easily add more later. The seeds will have attributes that will allow the player to predict and know when to plant the seeds and how long it will take.

Seed Attributes:

  • Plant Season: When the seed should be planted, so that it can grow
  • Growth Length: How long it takes before the seed is fully grown and can be harvested
  • Base Price: How much the seed costs
  • Sell Base Price: How much the crop goes for in the market. This fluctuates based on supply and demand.

The seasons will go by and the player will grow the seeds. The player will be able to grow crops many times during the different seasons, so that the player will be able to make enough money by growing enough crops during that season.

Seeds

  1. Strawberries
  2. Corn
  3. Rice
  4. Green beans
  5. Cotton
  6. etc

The problem is that each seed has to be researched, I want to have at least 10 or at least three that can be grown per season and several that can be grown all year around. It might come to it being that all seeds can be grown all year around and just have it to where next version the season are restricted to certain seasons.

Livestock

There will be only a few livestock that can be grown. The basic one of course will be cows to get milk and cheese. Chickens are another. You’ll be able to breed the animals to get more and there will be a lifetime for the animals.

The processing, for the meats, milk, cheese, etc will be automatic. In future versions, it will require processing buildings to process the animals. In the first version, it will be done automatically.

Markets

There will be a market for buying seeds and animals, and a market to sell crops and processed meats, cheese, etc to the cities. The buying will be a set price, but selling will be based on supply and demand. Also, the demand will be based on an algorithm that will change based on the “needs” of the population at the city. So each city will have different demands and once that demand has been reached the sell price goes down.

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